The first title in the acclaimed and bestselling crime series featuring Jack Taylor, a disgraced former police detective from Galway. Mourning the death of his father, Jack is slowly drinking himself into oblivion when he is asked to investigate a teenage suicide. Plunged into a dangerous confrontation with a powerful businessman and with the Irish police — The Guards — who have an unhealthy interest in Jack’s past, he finds that all is not as simple as it at first seemed and a dark conspiracy unfolds.

The impossible has happened: Jack Taylor is living clean and dating a mature woman. Rumour suggests he is even attending mass... The accidental deaths of two students appear random, tragic events, except that in each case a copy of a book by John Millington Synge is found beneath the body. Jack begins to believe that “The Dramatist,” a calculating killer, is out there, enticing him to play. As the case twists and turns Jack’s refuge, the city of Galway, now demands he sacrifice the only love he’s maintained, and while Iraq burns, he seems a step away from the abyss.

Cross (kros/ noun, verb, & adjective) means an ancient instrument of torture, or, in a very bad humour, or, a punch thrown across an opponent's punch.Jack Taylor brings death and pain to everyone he loves. His only hope of redemption — his surrogate son, Cody — is lying in hospital in a coma. At least he still has Ridge, his old friend from the Guards, though theirs is an unorthodox relationship. When she tells him that a boy has been crucified in Galway city, he agrees to help her search for the killer. Jack's investigations take him to many of his old haunts where he encounters ghosts, dead and living. Everyone wants something from him, but Jack is not sure he has anything left to give. Maybe he should sell up, pocket his Euros and get the hell out of Galway like everyone else seems to be doing. Then the sister of the murdered boy is burned to death, and Jack decides he must hunt down the killer, if only to administer his own brand of rough justice.

In The Emerald Lie, the latest terror to be visited upon the dark Galway streets arrives in a most unusual form: an Eton and Cambridge graduate who becomes murderous over split infinitives, dangling modifiers, and any other sign of bad grammar. Meanwhile, Jack is approached by a grieving father with a pocketful of cash on offer if Jack will help exact revenge on those responsible for his daughter’s brutal rape and murder. Though hesitant to get involved, Jack agrees to get a read on the likely perpetrators. But Jack is soon derailed by the reappearance of Emily (previous alias: Emerald), the chameleon-like young woman who joined forces with Jack to take down her pedophile father in Bruen’s Green Hell and who remains passionate, clever, and utterly homicidal. She is ready to use any sort of coercion to get Jack to conspire with her against the serial killer the Garda have nicknamed “the Grammarian,” but her most destructive obsession just might be Jack himself.